Funny Fool

Melissa at Shakesville asks:

When was the last time you made a fool of yourself in a fun way?

My answer: last Saturday. After our visit to St. Charles, N. and I went to a grocery store. I’m the one who cooks in the family, so N. wandered off and I concentrated on getting everything I needed for the recipes I had planned for this week. Have you ever seen an autistic concentrate on  something? If not, you might find it hard to understand this story.

So I’m walking around with my shopping cart, concentrating on the food items. And I perceive an alien and obnoxious presence by my side. It feels like somebody is walking next to me and emitting sounds. I heavily dislike people walking close to me and generating noise, so I pick up the pace in an attempt to avoid the alien presence. For about 15 minutes, I try to lose this creature who keeps following me. In the meanwhile, strange items keep appearing in my cart and I throw them out as I move along. Still, the strange items keep reappearing.

Finally, I stop to select a bag of oranges and notice a very polite woman who looks at me with quiet desperation.

“I’m sorry, but this is my cart,” she tells me and grabs the cart.

This is when I realize that the weird shit that kept appearing in my cart is actually stuff that the woman was trying to put into her own cart. If this were a Russian-speaking woman, she wouldn’t have followed me around meekly and politely. She would have simply barked, “What the fuck are you doing you vile bitch go kill yourself against a wall and die now bitch!!!!!” the moment I touched her cart. This was an American woman, however, and instead of barking she attempted to establish a dialogue and explain to me verbally that this was her cart.

[On a side note and so that people don’t accuse me of being unkind to my fellow Russian-speakers, it is very understandable why a Russian-speaking woman would have yelled at anybody touching her cart. Just imagine yourself being a product of several generations of people who all had their food carts – and all their food, too – collectivized the hell away from them and you will understand the angst one experiences when one sees anybody mess with one’s groceries.]

Of course, the American woman would have abandoned the struggle for the cart a while before had it not been for the fact that she had left her handbag and her canvas totes lying in the shopping cart that I took away from her.

I apologized profusely and helped the woman gather her items into her cart. After that, I went outside and stood there in a parking lot for 10 minutes laughing so hard that tears streamed down my face.